Seems to miss out a fairly important part of the life cycle - birth. Goods are created by someone, increasingly someone in China because we have all these eco-fascist rules that stop us doing so.

In terms of life cycle I assume this guy is like all those “environmentalists” who think electricity comes from plugs.

Windmills being one of the LibDems triumph of the will ideas.

Evidence and repeatability are the ways to persuade others: if something is true, then it can be tested and the results of such tests will speak for themselves.

If such tests give a different answer, then the original hypothesis is wrong. As a simple example, the theory/law of gravity states that (roughly speaking) if you drop something it will fall down. Anyone can test that for themselves. Get hold of something (preferably not something breakable), lift it up and let go. If the thing does drop down, then you’ve done an experiment to verify the law of gravity and proved it is true.

Of course, this is a ‘theory’ - at least in so far as the numbers we can measure go. Newton had one theory, but Einstein came up with a new one that, when the measurements were accurate enough, showed that Newton’s theory was wrong - in the umpteenth decimal place. If you don’t need to know the answer to such accuracy, Newton is still ‘right’ - good enough to work out the right answers. The difference is too small to be important if you are just aiming a canon, for example.

The same argument applies all the other theories of science - physics and biology and so on. The precise numbers may alter in extreme cases, but the principle remains reliable.

Now let’s bring God into the debate.

Possibly God invented/created that law. if so, then God made that law unbreakable - even by God. Every practical experiment gives the same result, if only to the limits currently available with practical measuring instruments.

The ‘theory’ may not be exact - like Newton’s theory of gravity - but, to a given degree of accuracy, it remains true.

The same argument applies to the ‘theory’ of evolution: many, many experiments have confirmed that this - to a good degree of accuracy - is true. It isn’t just a matter of fossil record, but DNA analysis points to exactly the same conclusion.

And where does that take us?

1 There may be a God who created these scientific rules, but having done that, God stands back to watch them work. Neither prayer nor faith will change those rules.

2 There may be an after-life where God rewards those who behave well, but all current science points towards ‘the soul’ (whatever that means) being an artefact of biological processes: electro-chemistry (hormones and stuff) can be explained - and verified by experiment - as the cause of emotion and so on. Experiments shown on TV even explain why mankind doesn’t have fur all over its body - the lice we attract are different from those of all other primates, and sweating is an important factor.

All that is still ‘theory’ - subject to refinement in the umpteenth decimal place - but is subject to more experiments by other people.

If there is a God, then God just set up the rules, then stands back to watch what happens by chance.

Worshipping that God is pointless (maybe except for a hypothetical after-life) because God set up those rules as unbreakable - nothing we do in any religious way will alter them - all we humans can do is to investigate what the rules actually are: be scientists!

I would like to defend exams on the grounds that they’re the only way we can be sure what we’re assessing is truly the students’ work. I’m sorry, but my experience is that with almost any form of assessed coursework done in the students’ own time, you just get the results of mass plagiarism and what the students call “working together” and I call “getting your bright friend to do all the work”. Time after time after time I’ve seen students hand in assessed courseworks which are near perfect, only to be absolutely hopeless when asked to do the same thing in an exam. I mean by this making mistakes which no-one who had actually done the work they claim to have done would possibly make, because doing the work in practice means these things become second nature to you.

You seem to be working to the assumption that exams are memory tests. This is an assumption I have to fight and fight and fight against with my students because in my experience the belief that “learning==memorisation” is the most pernicious barrier to true learning that exists. How many times do I tell my students “No, you have to work steadily in this throughout the term to develop a deep understanding of it, and you’ll only develop that deep understanding by solving the problems set which use it”? And how many of them still take this attitude that the way to pass exams is to “frantically cram” just before the exam day. Chris, no, NO, NO!!!, NO!!!!!!!!!!! Please, if this is what you believe, you are wrong, and if this is what you advise in your role as Academic Affairs Officer in your Student Union, you are unsuited to that role. Every year I see so many students fail because they’ve taken that approach. In pathological cases, they’ve actually sat down and memorised vast chunks of notes and examples I’ve given to illustrate some principle, rather than done the much simpler task of understanding that principle. Then they just reproduce that stuff from their memory in response to some trigger word in the exam paper, and they fail! They fail because what they wrote is irrelevant to the problem set and because memorising without understanding just doesn’t give you the capacity to answer questions which are about understanding. The best students, those who do well in exams, are always those who worked patiently through the material in term-time and developed the understanding of it that my exams test. Chris, how can I get my students to understand this and pass my exams when people like you keep telling them it’s all about last minute cramming?

A good exam is not about memorising, but about testing understanding through problem solving using the principles taught. If you really have grasped those principles, then when asked to sit down and use them, you can do so. Part of the problem is that both students and staff can be lazy, and it’s very easy to collaborate in this laziness by exams which are memory tests. Students like them because they’re not asking them to do any deep thinking, lazy academics like them because they’re easy to set and easy to mark and easy to teach to, and give the academic plenty of time to go off and write research papers which is the only thing the government cares that academics do (or at least, they’ve set the university funding system so that in effect it works that way).

But also, we now have Sats and GCSEs and the like which seem to be over-based on memory testing. We even have in the news recently some idiotic headmaster who claims to have had a major breakthrough in learning by introducing short-term memorising techniques:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2009/feb/13/spaced-learning-blog

All this tells you is the USELESSNESS of the exams in question. Believe me, I write this from experience and despair at the way the British school education system is going.